Alastair Cook hopes to create a new partnership with England's restored coach Peter Moores that can be as effective for England as Michael Clarke and Darren Lehmann have been for Australia, and has knocked back suggestions that Andy Flower will remain the power behind the throne.

Moores spoke of using his predecessor Flower as "a sounding board" following his move to a new job with the England and Wales Cricket Board as the technical director of elite coaching, but Cook acknowledged the need to make a "clean break" from the Flower era which ended in a 5-0 Ashes defeat.

"Me and Andy get on very well, we have been in contact over the last couple of months working on things with my captaincy," he said. "Having him as an adviser on that is something he wants to do and I want to do. But me and Mooresy have to be totally clear on what we want to do, me and him will steer the ship. Andy won't be making decisions behind our backs.

"It's going to be our team. Certainly we have to work very closely together, and I think you see when two coaches work together very well and they build something over a period of time how successful something can be if they're on the same page. Obviously me and Mooresy have got to chat about it but I have been consulted throughout the interview process. I'm sure we pretty much sing off the same hymn sheet [Cook slightly more tunefully than Moores, it should be noted], otherwise I don't think he would have been appointed."

Cook referred to the Clarke-Lehmann partnership in the context of learning lessons from everything Australia have done over the 10 months since Lehmann was appointed, on and off the field. "There's certainly a number of things they did very well as a side, and I think it would be wrong not to look at it and go 'Yeah, they got the whole country behind them'. Yes they played some very good cricket and all the other stuff was linked into that.

"You've got to give them credit for the way they suddenly changed their brand of cricket. They did it to their strengths. So there's no point us playing the way Australia played, because you need those kind of players to do it, and obviously Darren Lehmann and Michael Clarke had to be given a lot of credit. We're going to have to look at our side and play to their strengths. Mooresy said it's about people feeling comfortable enough to express themselves the way they want. I'm not going to bat like David Warner no matter how many people want me to, that's not going to work. But at the end of the day it's about how many runs you score."

Cook goes back almost a decade with Moores, who was running the National Cricket Performance Centre in Loughborough when he first entered the England system as a youngster. "When I heard it was Mooresy on Friday afternoon I was really excited by it," he said. "I've got on really well with Peter, not only the time where he was England coach, but we did quite a lot of work on the Academy together before that. I think he's a really good coach, a brilliant coach in fact, and a really good person."

He also agreed that the departure of Flower, who had formed such an effective double act with Andrew Strauss, would help him stamp his own mark on the team. "I certainly think I inherited a side from Straussy and Flower, and now it does seem a bit of a clean break with the new head coach," Cook said. "So to me it is the start of it – quite a good place to start, after winning in India and being an Ashes-winning captain as well. It hasn't all been doom and gloom.

"The crucial thing is making good decisions on the field and off the field, and creating a culture and an image of an England cricket team which I will be proud of. The way Peter described it as well, making people proud of the way we go about our business. Yes it is a results driven business, we know that. But the way we communicate with the public … that kind of stuff, the Englishness, the legacy you want to leave behind of the culture we want to create.

"As a captain I seem to have got rid of two coaches and an MD," he said, having expressed his sympathy for Ashley Giles after he had been overlooked. "So I'm not sure what has quite happened. It's been an amazing 18 months. I had Andy as the full-time coach, then Andy and Ashley as coaches and now Peter. Over 18 months that's quite a lot to deal with.

"We have been in limbo the last couple of months, coming back from Australia, devastated with what happened, and you start to think about how to turn things around.

"You have a lot of ideas, talk to a lot of people, but you can't actually follow through until the head coach came in. When I found who it was, it was a weight off my shoulders. I can now pick up the phone and talk cricket."

Giles has still to inform the ECB whether he wishes to retain the role as a selector that he has held since 2008. If he steps down, they would be left with only two official selectors – James Whitaker, who succeeded Geoff Miller as the national selector during the winter, and the Middlesex director of cricket Angus Fraser – with Moores also expected to contribute, as Flower had been doing before his resignation.

England remain confident of securing Paul Farbrace as Moores's assistant despite further criticism from Sri Lanka. Their chief selector, Sanath Jayasuriya, appeared to acknowledge the inevitability of Farbrace's departure when he said the World Twenty20 winning coach "has decided to move on without giving us adequate time to make the necessary adjustments".

Farbrace joined Sri Lanka from Yorkshire last December on a two-year contract, with a clause requiring him to give six months' notice before leaving, but there is thought to be a six-month probation period in which that does not apply. He is due to meet Sri Lankan officials in Colombo on Monday.